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Cone and with each other, crawling under the Cone, telling other viewers about particularly engaging spots to see it from, and blowing smoke through it. (In order to keep the Cone's thin shaft of light visible, McCall usually makes sure the screening space is smoky before the film begins, or asks that viewers smoke during the presentation.) Often, groups who experience the film lose their self-consciousness and, by the end, are interacting freely. As McCall explains in his program notes for
Line Describing a Cone,
the audience experience generated by the film is a way of throwing into relief the implied politic of the normal screening situation, with its rigid rows of seats and "hidden" projection booth.
By the mid seventies McCall had become dissatisfied that the interactive process explored in
Line Describing a Cone
and other early films was available only to a very small audience in rather cloistered situations: colleges, art galleries in a few major cities. He began to consider the relationship of experimental art making to the larger, commercial society. One result was his involvement with
an anticatalogue
(New York: Catalogue Committee of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, 1977), an anthology of articles exposing the implicit political agenda encoded in the power structures of contemporary art museums and in the art shows generated by these institutions. Another result was a pair of collaborative films:
Argument
(1978) and
Sigmund Freud's Dora
(1979).
Argument
was a collaboration with Andrew Tyndall, who had come to the art world with a background in journalism and commercial film reviewing. Their idea was to use the fact that the audience for experimental forms of filmmaking was small (albeit educated, intelligent, sophisticated)
as a resource
. They proposed their ninety-minute feature as a catalyst for an extended discussion among the members of the Downtown art community (and related communities in other areas) about the position of such communities vis-à-vis Western consumer culture. In order to contextualize the plight of the serious film artist, they decided to use
Argument
to conduct a filmic examination of the aesthetic, economic, and political implications of using printed text and still photography in the world of mass-market commercial mediaas exemplified specifically by the September 18, 1977, issue of the
New York Times Magazine
(devoted to men's fashion), the November 14, 1977, issue of
Time,
and the July 1977 issue of
Esquire
.
Argument
is serially organized into five differently structured units, each of which presents the viewer with a different balance of text and imagery. These structural units are arranged A, B, C, D, E, A, C, D, B, E, D, C, B, A. For many viewers,
Argument
is a frustrating and annoying experience. We are asked to read and hear the same or similar information over and over, always in contexts that frustrate our ability to